Trembling With Fear 07/07/2019

Scrambling for Justice

With no dead body, will a jury of his peers convict Jack of a crime he may not have committed?

On the fifth day of deliberations, the locked room began to suffocate, cave in, and swirl around the twelve jurors’ heads.

 

The jury was deadlocked at 9-3. Mary, Little Miss Muffet, and Little Red Riding Hood stubbornly held out on a not-guilty verdict.

 

Peter Piper had been elected foreman, and he damn sure wasn’t going to settle for a hung jury in his first real trial. His mother had been on his case lately about being fired from his pepper-picking gig, not having any real direction in life, and squatting in her basement without paying rent. He would show her. If he could lead a jury in a serious murder trial, that was sufficient proof that his life had purpose enough to extend his stay in her basement by a few more months.

 

The evidence was quite clear, in his opinion. Humpty Dumpty disappeared off the castle’s surveillance wall and hadn’t been seen since last Thursday. With one tiny piece of broken shell left behind, the king was convinced that the poor fella had been scrambled, and the only suspect was Jack Be Nimble. He was the only person in the kingdom with the agility to scale that ten-foot wall. And he had made no secret of the fact that he needed a higher-protein diet to improve his jumping game.

 

Most of the jurors were with Peter on the guilty verdict. They had places to go, things to do. They wanted out of that jury room, and they didn’t care who had to go to jail to make that happen.

 

“I’m sorry,” the ever-so-contrarian and jittery Mary said, slurping on her third cup of black coffee of the morning. “Without a body, I can’t in clear conscience send poor Jack to jail for the rest of his life based just on circumstantial evidence.”

 

Peter gave Mary a nasty stare-down, but Mary ignored him, trying to steady her shaky hands on her mug.

 

Little Red Riding Hood stood up dramatically, sending her chair screeching backwards. Mother Goose’s eyes shot open from her momentary nap as she grabbed her hearing aid and growled with irritation. Red’s cape unfurled behind her as she rose to her full six-foot stature and stomped two chairs down to flank Mary, resting her brawny hands protectively on Mary’s shoulders. Red glared at Peter, with a clear don’t-mess-with-my-girl warning.

 

Peter cleared his throat and pretended to adjust his seat, but his protruding gut left no room to maneuver. Without making eye contact, he stammered, “Look, I think I speak for most of the people in this room when I saw that we’d all like to get back to our lives and our families.”

 

His mother had probably changed the locks by now.

 

Black Sheep smashed the butt of his cigarette into the table. There were no fewer than four “No Smoking” signs around the room, but Black disregarded them, chain-smoking at least a pack a day. No one dared to challenge him. Poor Little Bo Peep, who sat to his right, kept fanning the air in front of her to keep the fumes from wafting in her direction.

 

“Peter’s right!” Black growled. “Humpty took his surveillance job very seriously, and he never left his post in the seven years that I knew him. He’s dead, and Jack did it.”

 

Little Miss Muffet piped in quietly but firmly, “I agree with Mary. We can’t know for sure that Humpty’s dead.”

 

“Oh for crying out loud,” barked Tommy Tucker, pounding his fist into the table. “Don’t you dames understand anything? Humpty’s not on his wall! He’s supposed to be on that wall! If he’s not on that wall, then he’s dead!”

 

The bailiff knocked twice before flinging the door open. The caterer, a short, scruffy-looking wolf, rolled in a food-laden cart.

 

“Oh, good, here comes our lunch,” Little Boy Blue interjected, trying to defuse the tension. “I think we can all use a break.”

 

Peter glanced at the wall clock, frustrated that another half-day had gone by and they were no closer to a verdict. As he was trying to refocus his gaze back from the far wall, he noticed the wolf make prolonged eye contact with Red before unloading the dishes onto the table: salmon with a dill butter sauce, a veggie platter, Cobb salad, avocado egg salad, and Sriracha deviled eggs.

 

Eep the Mouse was the first of the famished jurors to dive in. But just as he was about to grab a deviled egg, the table began to shake violently. The hard-boiled pieces from the lunch menu shot up and coagulated into a lumpy, cold, bloody blob above the table. After a few seconds of self-assemblage, the eyes that glowered at them from the solidified mass were instantly recognizable to everyone in the room.

 

Mary gasped. Red ran in front of Mary to shield her from the wrath of the glob.

 

“How could you?” it boomed at Mary as she cowered behind Red.

 

“She never loved you, Humpty!” Red screamed. “She’s with me now!”

 

Peter shot up from his chair out of shock but didn’t quite know how to react to Humpty picking this moment to put himself back together again—if the bloody, scrambled assemblage could be called that.

 

“When I threatened to take photographic evidence of their illicit affair to the king if Mary didn’t come back to me, she and Red pushed me off the wall,” Humpty roared. “And they were going to have Jack take the fall for their evil act!”

 

“I—I wasn’t going to let Jack go to jail for this!” Mary whimpered. “That’s why I wanted to get on this jury and make sure it couldn’t reach a verdict!”

 

The vengeful embryo spewed his eggy innards in all directions. When the bailiff came to unlock the jury room at 5 p.m., he found a bewildered Peter splattered with bloody yolk. Nine other jurors also peered up from the carnage.

 

Mary and Red were gone.